On Tue, Dec 20, 2016, at 05:20 PM, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 04:48:44PM +0100, Pavel Raiskup wrote: > > I probably lost the context ... what real-world problems are trying to fix? > > Everything which comes to my mind should be solved by better tooling for > > updates-testing testers. > > I've given this in several ways across the thread, but I don't mind > restating. :) > > 1. I believe in the value of releases, for the project and for end > users — as opposed to a "rolling release" system. But major releases > are a lot of work across the project — not just release engineering, > but marketing, ambassadors, design, docs, and others. One possible > way to reduce this is to have major releases less frequently. I want > a cadence that gives us the highest return on effort. Maybe that's > six months — and maybe it isn't. If we prepare to do more "significant" updates during the release cycle we are going to need to do some of this streamlining regardless. It sounds like this is worthy of exploring solely as a need to grow area. > 2. I really want releases to come at a known time every year, +/- two > weeks. Keeping to this with six month targets means that if (when!) > we slip, the next release may only have five or four months to bake. > This doesn't seem like it's the ideal for the above — maybe we can > get the engineering processes streamlined enough to make it > comfortable, but there's still the matter of marketing and the rest. We build Fedora for a lot of reasons, and I think this one is as important as the others. I believe that we will find an easier time creating energy around our releases if they are more known in time. I am not sure they have to be once per year on a fixed calendar, but they need to represent the culmination of work to introduce significant features. I actually would prefer to see a feature-gated release option as opposed to only thinking in terms of time-gates. I think having something to say is more important than knowing when you're going to speak. > 3. The modularity initiative will mean that different big chunks of > what we use to compose the OS can update at different speeds and > have different lifecycles. That gives us a lot more flexibility in > the above, and I'd like us to start thinking about what we *want* > to. Building on this, major module releases might be the feature-gate trigger we need to do a new "release" while incremental improvement gets pushed out as a .X release. > I suggested one release a year as an alternative to the current two per > year. I guess three per year would be possible (but seems counter to > the above); other plans like eight- or nine-month cycles don't have the > fixed-calendar property I'm looking for (and I'm pretty sure no one > wants to go to one every two years). > > The proposals previously in this thread are ideas aimed at presenting > users with an annual release from a marketing/ambassadors/design, etc., > point of view, but also addressing our upstream stakeholders' desire to > have Fedora ship their software fast. (For example, GNOME.) I hoped we > could find ways to make them also reduce release effort for developers, > packagers, releng, and QA, but from the feedback so far people don't > really feel like those particular suggestions do. > > Another possibility would be to simply keep releases as normal but go > revist the "tick-tock" cadence we talked about a while ago: that is, a > May/June release aimed at features, and faster Oct/Nov release where we > concentrate on infrastructure — and then call that second release each > year the ".1". Tick-tock makes me worried that people will begin to assume the Tick isn't worthwhile and they should wait on Tock. > And yet another possibility is that we keep things as they are. If > that's the overall consensus, okay. :) Now you're talking crazy :P j/k! regards, bex _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe send an email to devel-leave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
